Rebellion

CHAPTER 16

“Where did I go wrong?” wailed Wil the Sump, rubbing his cavernous, eaten-away nostril until it bled.

The little man was deep underground in the Hellish Conduit, a down-plunging passageway so sweltering and humid that each breath clagged in his throat and had to be consciously swallowed. A place where green, corrosive fluids seeped from the walls and welled sluggishly up through cracks in the floor; where sickening emanations howled out of the depths; where luminous, tentacled growths sprouted from every crack and cranny, and tiny multi-legged creatures cowered in cracks while the plants were the predators.

Wil clawed at the encrusted wall until his fingernails tore to splinters, but it did not ease the agony he felt inside. The only thing that could take away the pain of his failure was the perilous alchymical solvent called alkoyl. But he had sniffed the last of his alkoyl eight days ago, he had no way of getting more, and withdrawal was like fishhooks dragging through his brain.

That wasn’t the worst, though. Wil’s beloved land was in danger and no one else could save it. The ice sheets were creeping up from the southern pole, closing in around the coast, and if they were not stopped they would grind all life off the face of the land, as they had already extinguished everything on the great southern island of Suden.

To save his country, Wil had to erase the iron book, The Consolation of Vengeance, that he had stolen from under Lyf’s nose, then reforge the pages and rewrite them to tell the true story. Wil loved books and stories more than he loved his own miserable life, and the true story of Cython had to be told. He had to know how the story ended, but how could he find the right ending now?

He felt sure it involved the subterranean Engine, way down the Hellish Conduit at the heart of the world. Cythonians believed that the Engine powered the workings of the land itself, and Wil had planned to open the stopcocks to make the Engine race and melt the ice away. But the Engine had proven to be so vast, hot and terrifying that his courage had failed him, and he had run and kept on running. The Engine’s story was beyond his power to write.

Nor could he rewrite the iron book. He had not yet succeeded in erasing the words Lyf had written, the words that had seemed so right until the one had appeared and made Lyf’s story go wrong. That was Wil’s fault too. Long ago he had lied to the matriarchs about the one, and though they had put all those little slave girls to death to get rid of her, Tali had survived and changed the story. She had changed everything.

To erase the iron book, Wil had to have more alkoyl, but the stores held in Cython were closed to him now. The only other place to get more was the source, the Engine itself, for as it worked the Engine wept small quantities of the universal solvent. However he dared not approach the source.

Until something changed, he would have to wait. But his pain could be endured no longer and he had a remedy for that. In the dark of night he would creep up the Hellish Conduit into Cython, and there he would strangle the life out of the first Pale he encountered. He should have killed Tali the first time he had seen her.

That was only right and just.

Tali was the one.

It was all her fault.